Majesty in all its magnificence

Image 1 of 2

Powerhouse: Henry VIII was not shy in flaunting his wealth and influence

Image 1 of 2

David Starkey

12:01AM GMT 21 Dec 2004

When David Starkey was asked by the National Art Collections Fund to create his fantasy art collection, he chose Henry VIII's reckless accumulation of opulent objects, everything from Holbein to solid gold ear-scrapers

Henry VIII may be best known for the number of his wives, but it is the sheer number of his possessions that should really clamour for attention. He had by far the largest library then accumulated in England.

He amassed about 2,000 pieces of gold and silver plate, much of it studded with jewels, and a considerable part of it made of solid gold. He had tens of thousands of pieces of weaponry; hundreds upon hundreds of pieces of superb armour, and much, much more besides.

The king also owned 2,000 pieces of tapestry, the world's largest collection. A set of 10 of those tapestries cost him £2,000 – equivalent to the annual income of an earl.

Henry's own income at the beginning of his reign was £100,0000, making him unimaginably rich when you consider that a £1 was worth at least a £1,000 of today's money. So Henry spent the equivalent of about £2 million on a single set of tapestries.

All of these treasures filled his many palaces to overflowing. Henry's private apartments at Hampton Court were stuffed with treasures, jewels, paintings, books and every kind of thing for the delectation of mind, body and soul. Our modern notion of systematic collecting and aesthetics barely applies here. Henry was not building up a collection in our sense of the word: he was accumulating things to furnish acres of space.

One of the most important things to understand about Henry is that he was completely, by our standards, tasteless. Rooms such as Hampton's Court's tapestry-lined Great Hall, with its brilliantly painted and gilded ceiling and stained glass windows, would have created an effect of overwhelming dazzle: ostentatious, relentlessly colourful, and totally nouveau.

Although the rooms themselves may have had elements of extremely lavish decoration, they were in reality cavernous barns. To turn them into something magnificent, they had to be dressed as stage sets. There were some very extraordinary moments – such as in 1527 when Holbein himself was called in to design and paint temporary paintings for a banquet, which were thrown away the moment it was over.

Had they been kept, these pictures would now be worth countless millions. Historians call this process of transformation "portable magnificence". In other words you take a barn-like space and pile gloriously rich and vulgar objects into it in quantity.

In each corner of the room you would erect "stages" – buffet or sideboards – on which you would put stupendous quantities of gold and silver plate.

The Royal Clock Salt, for example, is all gold – ostentatious, expensive and infinitely gaudy, and could just as well have come from Asprey's. It is now held by the company of Goldsmiths. Another famous but long-vanished Salt was designed by the great Holbein himself and was a gift to Henry on New Year's Day 1544.

It is a super-complicated, astronomical instrument that could do just about anything. There was a clock at the top, a form of sundial, an hourglass and a compass – it's a very elaborate boy-toy.

We know from royal inventories that it was a gift from Sir Anthony Denny, the man who controlled the inner royal sanctums and the inner royal possessions, and was Henry's favourite servant (and, since he had a public role as a sort of gatekeeper to the king, he was the equivalent of Alastair Campbell) in the latter part of his reign.

This enormous quantity of treasure, particularly the gold and silver, was also eminently portable. The whole royal court, at least at the beginning of Henry's reign, was constantly on the move, travelling between first 15, then 30 and finally – at the end of Henry's reign – 55 royal palaces.

Often Henry only spent three or four days at a time in any one of them. Leeds castle in Kent was little more than a very expensive B&B on the road to Dover, as Henry only stayed there three times in a reign of over 30 years.

This peripatetic life is one of the reasons why tapestry was so important. You could arrive at a boring shell of a palace that was rather damp, with crumbling plaster, that hadn't been maintained. If you had 55 houses, how could you keep up the repairs? But tapestry does wonders.

You can nail it up quickly on the walls, get a roaring fire going, put piles of perfume in one of the golden or gilt-bronzed perfume burners and, within an hour before the king arrives, the whole place smells sweet and fresh and warm and comfortable, and nobody notices the dead mice, the rats and the mould.

This world of portable magnificence was also a world governed by aristocratic, knightly culture, in which the essential purpose of being a man was to fight. The aristocracy belonged to a killing culture in which the proper male occupation was killing other men in war, according, of course, to strict rules.

The next best thing was pretending to kill men in mock war – the joust. And third in line was the hunting and killing of animals, again in accordance with strict conventions.

This is one of the reasons for the proliferation of weapons and armour in Henry's collection. The suits of armour also give us important information about Henry's build, his height and, of course, his increasingly monstrous fleshiness.

If you compare an early suit with one dating from 1540, you can see that in only 20 years Henry had become so vast that v-shaped steel gussets had to be inserted so that it would fit around his expanding body, with its 54" chest and a waist of slightly bigger dimensions.

Henry took huge pride in this athletic apparatus, which was an essential part of being a man, a king and a warrior, and of advertising the fact.

Of course, warriors had to keep up with the latest fashions in combat gear and were constantly on the look-out for new devices that would make them more impregnable: gauntlets, for example, that locked on the sword so that it couldn't be struck out of the hand; or new designs to make the visor of the helmet more impenetrable to the lance. We may look on armour as art; but they thought of it as sports equipment.

During Henry's reign an extraordinary change took place in the number and layout of his palaces. First of all, he became staggeringly rich, by attacking the Church and confiscating the wealth of the monasteries, which was between a third and a fifth of the land in England.

At a stroke he doubled his income and went on an enormous spending binge, building, for example, the great network of forts dotted along the coast of southern England, from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. But he spent most of his money on his palaces. He inherited 15. He finished up with 55, four or five of them with between 1,000 and 1,500 rooms – each.

The second change was that Henry grew older and, like everyone else's, his tastes changed with age. When he was young, he was relentlessly mobile. But then he began to suffer from problems in his leg – not the result of syphilis but probably caused by an osteomylitic ulcer from bone splinters in the calf.

The pain was such it meant that he couldn't ride around the country from palace to palace, as he'd been able to do when he was young. Instead he settled down in a handful of great palaces in and around London with even greater parks surrounding them.

As a result, Henry started having buildings that were permanently furnished, which in turn led to a revolution in interior decoration. Until then everything could be transported around.

Then from the late 1530s and particularly from the early 1540s, Henry would stay in a handful of vast houses for months at a time, with rooms furnished in a completely recognisable, modern way. And the man in charge of this was Sir Anthony Denny, who gave the king that splendid piece of astronomical equipment.

He rejoiced in the extraordinary title of Groom of the Stool. When the Victorians came to look at this office, they spelt it s-t-o-l-e, and imagined all kinds of fictions about elaborate robes draped around the neck of the monarch at the coronation. That is not what Denny was Groom of.

He was the Royal Lavatory Attendant, the monarch's most intimate servant and in charge of the most staggering accumulation of loot ever to appear in England. And the inventory of the Palace of Whitehall of 1542 lists it all. (The 1542 Inventory of Whitehall: the Palace and its Keeper by Maria Hayward, is published by Illuminata.)

Central to the inventory accounts are the Close Stools, covered in silk and satins, padded with swans' down, trimmed with gilt nails, with Venetian gold fringing and elaborate systems of cisterns and pots. Then there are the everyday toiletry objects, made of gold, such as a device, rather like a Swiss Army knife, for scooping earwax, and picking the nose and teeth.

Among this world of extraordinary intimacy, we find the paintings listed. Henry is the first English king to have had a seriously significant collection of paintings, but for what purpose is anybody's guess. Some are easy to place. There is a list of portraits of ancestors; Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV and so on.

Henry modelled himself on Henry V, but it was his grandfather, Edward IV, whom he most resembled – vast, 6'4" tall, lustful and given to fat in later life. Even Richard III is there along with Henry's father, Henry VII, his mother Elizabeth of York and his grandmother Margaret Beaufort. Any contemporary comment on these pictures is unknown.

Then there are paintings that belong to an entirely different category, such as the famous Holbein portrait of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife. We know nothing of what Henry thought of this painting, or whether he cared about it, but we do know that he kept only one picture of all six of his wives, and this was it (for Jane was the mother of his only son Edward).

In other words, all the other wives were obliterated, not a single image was kept, and none is to be found in his inventory at the time of his death. There is also the wonderful anonymous portrait of his son Edward, painted after Holbein's death and given to Henry as a New Year's gift in 1546/47.

Even more beautiful is the twin image of his daughter Elizabeth, given to Henry at the same time, and again in his collection at the time of his demise. Finally there is one of the most famous pictures in the National Gallery, acquired with the National Art Collections Fund's help, also in Henry's collection until the end.

Why? Not because it's a Holbein, but because he fancied the sitter. It is the image of the woman Henry thought he should have married instead of Anne of Cleves. It's Christina of Denmark and he kept her in his collection as an object of desire.

This is something we need to address, firmly and squarely, when we look at pictures. For example, many of the great collection of paintings that Titian produced for Philip II of Spain are soft porn and, since they were hung in the royal bedchamber, they appeared to have been treated as such.

In the same way Cardinal Wolsey had perfectly disgraceful tapestries of the Vices in his bedchamber, which were not there to warn the Cardinal about what he shouldn't do but rather to provide him with titillation about what he might and (to judge by his bastard offspring) did do.

Finally, Henry had an astonishing collection of libraries, books and writing desks, but they weren't there for the pure delight of scholarship. Henry did read for pleasure, but his wonderful hoard of books was accumulated for quite another purpose – to argue for the divorce against the papal supremacy, and for his position as supreme head of the English Church.

So, all the incredible things – pictures, books, armour, ornaments – that made up Henry VIII's vast accumulation of objects were never considered to be works of art, transcendently rich, rare and valuable as they are.

They were things to be used, displayed, enjoyed, and to flaunt status. We therefore need to think very hard about our own fantasies concerning historical collections and the reverence we accord works of art today.

• To find out more about the National Art Collection Fund, call 0870 848 2003, or visit www.artfund.org.